100 Boots: Layli Long Soldier and Douglas Kearney

This series presents readings by a range of emerging, mid-career, and established poets from St. Louis and across the United States. The 100 Boots Poetry Series is co-organized by Jessica Baran, poet and Associate Director of Curatorial and Program Development at Barrett Barrera & Projects Plus Gallery; and Ted Mathys, poet and educator at St. Louis University. At each reading, limited-edition broadsides are available for free to audience members, and a selection of the poets’ books are for sale courtesy of Left Bank Books. The final event of the season features readings by poets Layli Long Soldier and Douglas Kearney.

Layli Long Soldier is a member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe. She has served as a contributing editor of Drunken Boat, and her poems have appeared in The American Poet, The American Reader, and The Kenyon Review Online. Long Soldier is the recipient of the 2015 Native Arts and Cultures Foundation National Artist Fellowship, a 2015 Lannan Literary Fellowship, and a 2016 Whiting Award. In 2017, she published her newest collection of poems, WHEREAS (Graywolf Press). She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Douglas Kearney has published six books, most recently, Buck Studies (Fence Books, 2016), winner of the Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize, the CLMP Firecracker Award for Poetry, and silver medalist for the California Book Award (Poetry). He was the guest editor for 2015’s Best American Experimental Writing (Wesleyan), and he has received a Whiting Writer’s Award, residencies/fellowships from Cave Canem, The Rauschenberg Foundation, and others. Kearney’s work has appeared in a number of journals, including Poetry, nocturnes, Pleiades, Iowa Review, Boston Review, and Indiana Review; and anthologies, including Resisting Arrest: Poems to Stretch the Sky, Best American Poetry, Best American Experimental Writing, Of Poetry and Protest, Wide Awake: Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond, The Breakbeat Poets, and What I Say: Innovative Poetry by Black Poets in America. Raised in Altadena, CA, Kearney lives in California’s Santa Clarita Valley and teaches at CalArts.